To back up or to sync?

[Juan Carlos Vindas]

Hello every one.

I have a doubt. Is it better to back up my files of is it better to just sync?

Thanks for your help since this is a bit confusing for me. :)

[Diane Miller]

Here's my strategy (on a Mac system). I'm simple minded so I like straightforward stuff I can understand.

The hard drive that contains the operating system and all the programs gets cloned (a bootable backup) to an external hard drive every few days, as I think about it. I just plug it in and it runs. So if my boot drive fails, I just plug in the external and I can still run, just a little slower. And when I replace the internal drive I can clone back to it and be right back where I was last time I cloned.

Two other internal hard drives store image files and they are backed up on an automatic schedule once a day (at dinnertime, to minimize competition for CPU resources). It is a completely simple backup -- it makes a duplicate of each internal drive to a matching external one. Not a complete from-scratch full copy, but a much faster thing -- if something was added or deleted on the internal, it gets added or deleted on the external. The external looks just like the internal, and I can use it interchangeably if I need to, except, of course, it isn't cataloged in Lightroom. I don't think it would be considred a sync becuase if something got trashed an image on the external, it wouldn't get copied to the internal. It's strictly one way.

I use SuperDuper to do this. I'm sure Windows has similar utilities. When I'm gone for more than a day I store these external drives off-site.

More than you asked, and just presented for whatever general audience stops by, but I've seen a lot of people who have lost years of files because they thought backups were too complicated and they'd look into it someday. Hard drives are guaranteed to fail.

[David Stephens]

The real key is getting the backup offsite. Merely having a backed up or synced HD in the same room as the computer only protects you from a crash of the internal HD. Fires, floods and tornadoes do indeed happen and in the last year I know of two people that lost their life's work in a fire in one case and flood in the other.

Sync is probably the way to go, BUT you must test periodically to be certain that the sync is complete and usable. The sync will only be as good as your software.

[Juan Carlos Vindas]

Many thanks to Diane and David for your valuable advise. Will inquire a bit more to see if I am doing thins right.

[Diane Miller]

Yes, I'm taking a risk with my strategy, but a sync to something offsite would take forever with the many TB of files I have. If you start early in your image accumulation, it is more practical. But I've also known of people who lost files that were only stored in some online location. Doing both would be best.

[David Stephens]

Yes, I'm taking a risk with my strategy, but a sync to something offsite would take forever with the many TB of files I have. If you start early in your image accumulation, it is more practical. But I've also known of people who lost files that were only stored in some online location. Doing both would be best.

The more that you have to lose, the more that you need to invest the time to get it done. I'll reiterate, I personally know two people that have lost their life's work in the last twelve months, one due to fire and one due to flood.

Doing the first backup will be the most time consuming. If you sync regularly thereafter, it shouldn't be so bad. I've had an external drive at my office to serve as my offsite. We're now installing a HD in the office network to speed up transfer and increase reliability (I sometimes have trouble waking up my work computer remotely). (There's only three of us in the office and two of us are owners).

If you can't do that at work, work out a deal with a photographer friend, where you serve as their offsite and they serve as yours.

[Diane Miller]

OK -- more information desired, for those of us who don't have access to an office. I assume something like a rack of JBOD drives would work, and I'd arrange with the friend that each of us would leave our computers on at whatever specified hour the backups would occur. We could stagger backup times to minimize traffic. We could each do the initial backup in house, hardwired, and then swap the drives.

So here's where I don't have experience: what software (automated) do I use to get into that remote drive stack? I'm on a Mac system (Lion) but the most likely friends would be on a PC.

[David Stephens]

Sorry, I don't know Mac, so I'd go with Peter's advice, except I'm not sure what he means by two back-ups. I have an offsite back-up and an archive in my processing room. I don't consider the Archive a back-up. To have two backups, I'd have one offsite and, perhaps, one in a Cloud solution.

I DO have a second backup of my JPEGs, but only the JPEGs, so I don't consider it complete. That's on Flickr, where I have unlimited storage (because I was a "Pro" user before they started offering 1TB free to anyone). Having my JPEGs back up would prevent a complete loss if some equipment/software failure corrupted all my Archive and backup. That's not be as remote as it might seem, given the step up in malware attacks with destructive worms. I manually induce sync rather than automatically scheduling it. This gives me a chance to halt a sync if I'm worried about my system's health.

[Dan Brown]

I am using PC. I maintain 3 external copies of an internal drive, (not my OS drive). I use Syncback, a free program that can be used on demand or on a schedule. It only adds and/or deletes whatever is needed to maintain the identical copy of the internal drive's data. I have it set to automatically run after 20 minutes of inactivity on the system. I also have started burning my original captures to BluRay for a redundancy in medium also but have yet to go back and burn all my files. As for cloud-type backup, I create a derivative (JPEG, 2500PX on the long side, 1.6mb) of my best images (IMO) that will produce a large print and upload that to Smugmug. So, if something happens, I will at least have something! And I still worry about it :-(

[Juan Carlos Vindas]

Again many thanks to Dan Brown, Peter Kes and David Stephens for your more than kind advise.